The color wheel wars

Newton bent the spectrum into the first color circle (Opticks, 1704) — a physicist's wheel. Goethe published Theory of Colours in 1810 arguing Newton missed the point: color is also perception, psychology, experience. The scientists sided with Newton; the artists never stopped reading Goethe. At the Bauhaus, Johannes Itten built teachable structure — contrasts, harmonies, the student exercises behind every “color theory 101” — later collected in The Art of Color (1961). Then Josef Albers' Interaction of Color (1963) delivered the working artist's verdict: “In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is.” Context is everything — which any LD who's watched one look change meaning against different haze already knows. GEL's wheel is Newton's geometry with Albers' humility.